The Free Voice

by Ravish Kumar

  A small example, but I hope it will help you better understand PM Modi’s speech in Palanpur during the Gujarat elections. And when you think about this, remember why you elect prime ministers. Remember that you entrust them with the nation and everything that gives it dignity and stature. You trust them.

  Across the world, fake news has become the preferred way to subvert democracy and for authoritarian regimes to do as they please. From the capital cities to far-flung districts, an elaborate infrastructure has been developed to manufacture and spread fake news. Governments and their favoured corporations do this in tandem. Statements of heads of state carrying misleading information are printed on the front pages and flashed on prime-time television and when the misrepresentation is pointed out, none of these papers or channels summon the courage or even have the will to report that the prime minister or president has lied. In March 2017, Reporters without Borders released a report which rated countries across the world on the basis of the freedom of the press—India was ranked 136 among 180 countries. The performance of any government should be evaluated, along with everything else, on the grounds of whether the media is free during its tenure—and it isn’t just overt censorship that is a threat to press freedom but also the phenomenon of ‘godi media’—the lapdog media which functions as the PR department of the government. A UN committee warned in a statement on 4 March 2017 that across the world, people occupying constitutional positions are either declaring independent media organizations liars or calling them the opposition. Fake news is being used to impose a new kind of censorship. Critical thought is being suppressed.

  In March 2017, the Democrats, who are in the opposition in America, proposed a bill which said that matters have reached such a stage that fake news is being fed to American citizens by the President himself, and his spokespersons. Governments, organizations and universities all over the world are discussing fake news. It is a big problem in the Philippines. The president of the country, Rodrigo Duterte, has been accused of encouraging fake news to keep his hold on power. A Filipino senator has filed a bill in the senate which seeks to impose heavy penalties on government officials and media persons who spread fake news, including imprisonment ranging from five to twenty years.

  In November 2016, the University of Philippines launched an online channel, TVUP, to combat fake news. The executive director of the university issued a statement saying that he hoped that through this channel, the trash that was strewn in the online space could be countered so that the citizens of that country would have the opportunity to read genuine articles and access genuine news. The Sports Media and Cultural Committee of the British Parliament has also initiated an investigation of the effect of fake news on democracy.

  On the other hand, politicians and the agencies of political parties who broadcast fake news have begun a new campaign. The president of the US, Donald Trump, has accused the news channel CNN of spreading fake news. He does that to whichever media criticizes his government. The president of Turkey, Recep Erdogan, sent many journalists to jail claiming that by doing so he was combating the spread of fake news. The prime minister of Cambodia branded the media as anarchist, and said the foreign media working in the country was a threat to peace and stability. The Supreme Court of Cambodia even dismantled the country’s principal opposition party. The current age of media and Power is rife with many such examples.

  In India, some websites are battling fake news at their own levels. Between 2014 and 2017, many kinds and episodes of fake news were used to stoke tensions in society. The migration of families out of Kairana village in the Saharanpur district of UP in 2015-16 was given a communal colour by the BJP and its affiliates and debates continuously raged on TV that Kairana had been transformed into another Kashmir, with Hindus there being forced to flee ‘Muslim terror’ like the Kashmiri Pandits. This was a dangerous game in which prominent newspapers and news channels participated. The websites altnews.in, indiaspend.com, boomlive.com, www.hoax-slayer.net and—in Hindi—the website mediavigil.com have started to take up arms against such fake news. Pratik Sinha of altnews.in has managed to take the veils off fake news generated by numerous ministers, governments and websites. But this is happening on a very small scale. These valiant efforts make a very small dent on the fake news spread by the vast majority of the mainstream media.

  It is imperative that we define fake news very clearly. The common man hasn’t yet understood the many ways in which it is disseminated. Mistakes are committed in journalism, and every mistake isn’t fake news. But the specially crafted fake news that emerges regularly these days originates elsewhere and is fed to journalists and media houses, who reach it to everyone. People occupying constitutional positions then legitimize it with their statements. There is also another way in which fake news is being generated: all governments are stopping information from reaching the media. No one possesses critical information. In its place there are false information, spurious issues and loaded statements supplied by the government which keep the wheels of misinformation and propaganda turning. Issues are raised which have no connection with reality or do not have as much of a connection or impact as they are made out to have.

  Big political parties use fake news to destroy smaller ones. The latter, with their modest resources, are helpless, caught in the web of lies. The IT cells of powerful parties and their supporters are all engaged in disseminating false information. You could call it the equivalent of carpet bombing. Now, some political parties are constituting teams which catch fake news spread by other parties. For instance, during the elections in France, the National Front put together a Fake News Alert team. Parties in India will soon have to put together their own teams.

  The volume and spate of fake news increases during election time. In 2016, when a referendum was conducted in Italy on measures that would have changed its constitution and given the prime minister greater powers, half the stories shared on Facebook were spurious and clearly designed to influence the plebiscite. Alarmed by the torrent of false stories coming from Russia—notorious for its fake news factories believed to be funded by the government—the European Union recently constituted a task force, the East StratCom Team, to counter them. This team was provided with a lot of money and resources during elections in the Netherlands and France so that they could thwart Russian propaganda. Russia has been accused of spending a lot of money on fake news in order to manipulate elections in several countries, including America.

  In India, too, the quantity of fake news increases during elections. The Election Commission has no means to stem this flood. It doesn’t even have a firm definition of the phenomenon. What the Commission does acknowledge is paid news, though there isn’t yet a clear law to deal with that, either. The Commission creates Media Certification and Monitoring Committees at the state and district levels during every election to identify and catch paid news and issues notices to candidates asking for clarifications. In one of its reports, released in 2013, the Commission said that 1,400 instances of paid news were observed in the legislative assembly elections held in seventeen states between 2010 and 2013. The general election of 2014 threw up 787 cases of paid news. Over 3,100 paid-news related notices were issued to candidates in the 2014 elections.

  The Election Commission could not stop paid news but it did manage to create an agency which goes to work after each election is notified. However, nowadays all the games have usually begun even before the election dates are announced. There isn’t much for the Commission to do.

  The Election Commission defines paid news as ‘any news or analysis appearing in any media (print & electronic) for a price in cash or kind as consideration’, and says that it ‘plays a very vitiating role in the context of free and fair elections...advertisements [are published] in the garb of news items, totally misleading the electors’. But the beast has evolved and grown way beyond this. It isn’t just about advertisements masquerading as news any longer. It is now the era of fake news, and no fig leaf is needed; lies a
re the new truth. Fake news happens on such a large scale that the government, if it really values democratic principles, must constitute a separate commission for it during elections which, like the Election Commission—a regulatory authority—should have constitutional rights and also be independent. But given the track record not just of the present government but of every government in the short history of our republic, we can be sure this won’t happen in a hurry, if it happens at all.

  Fake news changes the character of society; perhaps not permanently but certainly for a significant length of time. You will remember the case of the Monkey Man in Delhi back in 2001. The Monkey Man was reported, variously, as a four-foot-tall hairy creature with a steel claw, an eight-foot giant with a snout and red glowing eyes, an alien with a steel helmet and three blinking buttons on its chest. Sometimes, whatever it was, became invisible, or became a cat. Grown men and women, teenagers and children lost themselves in the imaginings of a Monkey Man. They would stay up all night, cowering in fear or armed and ready to attack and kill the monster. A panic-stricken woman woken up by her neighbours’ shouting fell down the stairs and died; a man lost his life when he jumped off his balcony. A vagrant and a van-driver, both short-statured men, were chased and beaten up by mobs. This is exactly what fake news is doing to us today. It controls our behaviour in such a way that we become robots, we cease to be citizens, individuals capable of common sense and reason. Fake news keeps us awake at night; we see communities turn on each other because of it; we see people being beaten up, even killed because of it. We let it all happen.

  When a society goes collectively mad, the fallout affects the functioning of its law and order machinery. All agencies begin to react as dictated by the fake news. The Delhi Police tried to explain, quite vociferously, that no Monkey Man existed but it finally admitted defeat and announced a reward of 50,000 rupees for his capture. The home ministry was asked for help in the form of the Rapid Action Force. In view of the seriousness of the situation, a special team was put together and tasked with investigating the matter. The entire system began pursuing an untruth. Some saw the busy hand of Pakistan in the matter while others claimed it was the work of a local gang.

  Pakistan returned as the Monkey Man in the Gujarat elections of 2017.

  But let us return to Delhi, 2001 for now. In June that year, the Delhi Police finally solved the mystery. The report by its special committee, which included members of the Institute of Human Behaviour and the Central Forensic Laboratory, said that no Monkey Man existed at all. The then joint commissioner of police, Suresh Rai, said that no monkey, or any other animal for that matter, was the culprit. The police further said that Pakistan had no hand in the Monkey Man terror either, and no gang of hoodlums was involved. The police admitted that reckless media coverage had spread this madness. At that time, news channels had formed teams of five reporters each who would roam the streets of the city after dark looking for the Monkey Man, to get some soundbites from him. People saw these intrepid reporters out on the hunt night after night. Many among them are anchors on prime-time television today. Clearly, the practice they gained in embroidering and spreading the Monkey Man story is proving useful now.

  We hadn’t matured enough at the time when Monkey Man was making the rounds; which is why so many of us spent entire nights running around in confusion and jumping about to no purpose. We’ve made much progress since those days. We’ve become well-seasoned in this age of fake news. We are never in doubt. We swallow whatever we are given without question and start living with our consuming impressions and firm ideas. Our ability to digest fake news has improved and developed greatly.

  Which is why, in November 2016, long queues formed up in front of shops in many Indian states for sugar and salt. A message had arrived on WhatsApp announcing that there would soon be a severe shortage of sugar and salt. People of Delhi, Lucknow, Kolkata and Hyderabad turned in a good performance in the case, along with people from the smaller towns. The then chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Akhilesh Yadav, kept saying that this was a rumour and instructed government officials to take strict action against rumour-mongers. How nice it is that there is punishment for rumour-mongers but none for those who believe in them. The chief minister of Delhi, Arvind Kejriwal, and the Union minister for consumer affairs, food and public distribution, Ram Vilas Paswan, issued statements that there was no shortage of salt. But the rumours, as is their wont these days, WhatsApped their way—encrypted end-to-end—to Mumbai, and salt soared to 200 rupees a kilogramme. The Mumbai Police was also forced to tweet that this was a rumour. Nothing worked. News arrived from many places that shopkeepers were selling salt at prices as high as 600 rupees a kilo. There were reports that a woman had died in a stampede outside a shop in Kanpur.

  Fake news can also be used to falsify history. Powerful sections of the polity launch many false versions of history. Entire organizations are enlisted for this exercise, which makes it impossible for any single historian to challenge and refute the information that is put out there. Since May 2014, textbooks have been rewritten in many states. But the real mischief with history happens on social media, which is awash with false histories. It is the malice in these campaigns that needs to be examined.

  The prime target of most purveyors of fake history who are champions of our present regime is Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India. On 15 May 2016, Amulya Gopalakrishnan of the Times of India published a report on the kinds of lies being spread about Nehru:

  Jawahar is a word borrowed from the Arabic; no Kashmiri Brahmin will give his son an Arabic name.

  Nehru’s grandfather was called Ghiyasuddin Ghazi; he was a police officer during the Mughal era and he renamed himself Gangadhar Nehru.

  Nehru was born in a red-light area in Allahabad.

  Nehru impregnated a Catholic nun. The church sent the nun out of India for which Nehru remained grateful to the church all his life.

  Such hate-fuelled misinformation about Nehru was presented in the garb of news so that lakhs of people would consume it and hatred for him would spread widely. A video was put out in which it was said that he died of AIDS. He was shown as a debauched philanderer with the aid of doctored pictures with Jacqueline Kennedy and Mrinalini Sarabhai. Photoshop was freely used. Information on Wikipedia about Jawaharlal Nehru and his father Motilal Nehru was edited and changed. The Times of India, quoting Pranesh Prakash of the Centre for Internet and Society, reported that these edits on Wikipedia originated from a government of India IP address.

  In January 2016, the Narendra Modi government released previously classified documents related to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. Nothing of significance was revealed but simultaneously, a letter said to be written by Nehru in 1945 to the British prime minister Attlee was circulated on WhatsApp. In the letter, Nehru refers to Bose as a ‘war criminal’. The letter was fake—unsigned and full of spelling and factual errors—but many journalists were fooled. Leading newspapers and magazines of the country and several websites carried the letter—different versions, with different dates and different errors. When they discovered it was fabricated—which should have been apparent to any serious journalist even at a glance—everyone started to delete the letter and apologize.

  The internet is being filled with fake information about Nehru. When your child downloads this information for her school or college project or exam, she will write the wrong answers. It is possible that her teachers, inspired by a particular political ideology, will mark her well on those incorrect answers. And she will grow up believing that what she knows is the truth, when it is not. She may be an ideal citizen as long as the present BJP government rules. But regimes change, countries change. How would she have been equipped to deal with a future where some other kinds of lies become the official narrative? And how will she handle any kind of truth? Will she always live in a bubble, cut off from reality?

  It was with the aid of fake news that the most heinous violence in the history of mankind was sought to be er
ased. Hitler had millions of Jews murdered in gas chambers, an event we know as the Holocaust. A programme to make this truth vanish from the internet was put in motion. It was fortunate that Carole Cadwalladr of The Guardian noticed it. When Carole typed ‘Did the Holocaust Really Happen?’ into the Google taskbar, the reply that it threw up was that it didn’t. The search engine also took her to the neo-Nazi website www.stormfront.org on which were listed ten reasons why the Holocaust could never have happened.

  On 11 December 2016 Carole wrote a long piece for The Guardian. She reported that there are many such denial videos on YouTube too. This when it is a recorded fact, in books as well as historical documents, that Hitler had 6 million people killed. Till at least 2013, some survivors of Nazi concentration camps were still alive. After Carole raised these questions, Google did make amendments, but think of how many historical facts must have been similarly changed, how much history is likely being erased even as you read this. Just as it is being transformed with the aid of TV channels which play before our eyes every day.

  Here’s another interesting fact: Tom Reilly of The Sun Chronicle wrote in an editorial on 29 June 2017 that even a massive news organization like the Associated Press has fallen victim to fake news. This is an organization that is 171 years old, and has 243 news bureaus in 120 countries. Over 1,700 newspapers and 5,000 TV and radio networks around the world source news from it. Associated Press has accepted that some of the news it put out in recent times was fake. It has now started a news feature called ‘Not Real News’. This feature will reveal the truth about those nuggets of false news which go viral on Twitter and other platforms. But this is like cleaning a large lake with a small strainer.

  Rumours and fake news have always been the preferred weapons of fascists and majoritarian fundamentalists in democracies. By inciting mobs to fulfil their agendas, they use democracy to subvert and destroy democracy itself. Their perverse logic is this: if democracy is the will of the majority, is not a mob the majority? And which political party can afford to criticize democracy? They also know that a mob cannot be named, arrested, tried and convicted, so murder and intimidation can carry on unchecked.